LITTLE ROCK — Transportation officials and planners working on a project to replace the Broadway Bridge have begun the process of figuring out how to ease the traffic disruption that demolishing the old bridge and building the new one will create.
The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department has estimated that traffic on the bridge will be displaced for at least 18 months.
“There’s no doubt that it’s going to be a challenge,” said Randy Ort, a department spokesman. “Everybody recognizes that.”
Several local officials sat down with state highway officials last month at the first meeting to develop the transportation management plan.The meeting also included engineers from Garver LLC, the North Little Rock engineering firm the Arkansas Highway Commission selected to design the bridge.
While there is no timetable to complete a plan, Ort said, the construction contract for the bridge will be awarded in early 2014.
“Obviously there will be a plan in place when the bridge goes out of service,” he said. “Even then, we will continue to monitor [traffic] and make changes as needed.”
The Broadway Bridge, which opened in 1923, now carries about 24,000 vehicles daily. Where those vehicles will go is the $64,000 question and has been the subject of consternation for the mayors on both sides of the river and people who use the bridge daily or live and work near the bridge.
Many of the motorists in those vehicles likely won’t consider the Interstate 430 bridge or the Interstate 440 bridge. Both bridges are too far to be options for most. That leaves just the Main Street Bridge and the Interstate 30 bridge.
Bill Henry, traffic engineer for the city of Little Rock, calls the Main Street Bridge the “logical choice” as the alternate route.
With only 10,000 vehicles using it daily, the Main Street Bridge is under capacity. By contrast, the I-30 bridge is at capacity with 121,000 vehicles using it daily. It is scheduled to be widened once the new Broadway Bridge is completed.
But using the Main Street bridge is only one part of the traffic-management plan the designers will eventually draw up.
“We’ve got to figure out how to filtrate that traffic through the downtown street system,” Henry said.
A year ago, the potential traffic headaches associated with the project spurred then-North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Hays to suggest leaving the Broadway Bridge in place and building a new bridge upriver at Chester Street.
Garver, using regional traffic modeling figures, estimated the user costs associated with the project would reach about $40 million.
Road-user costs are figured from a formula based on the traffic on the area bridges, the additional time motorists would need to commute, the additional mileage they would have to travel, and the wear and tear on their vehicles.
It worked out to about 28 cents per motorist per day that the Broadway Bridge is closed, according to the Garver report.
But state highway officials stress those numbers are planning estimates and very preliminary as, indeed, is the 18 months that state highway officials are using to estimate how long the bridge will be out of commission.
No one will know exactly how long the crossing will be unavailable until the bids are opened, most likely some time early next year.
That is because the contract will contain incentives to expedite the completion of the work, which is among the strategies to limit the time the crossing will be closed.
In addition to the dollar amount, the contractors bidding for the project will also submit the number of days the bridge will be out as well as the overall length of time for the contract, said Mike Fugett, the state Highway and Transportation Department’s assistant chief engineer for design.
Both of the latter provisions will be assigned a dollar value based on the road user costs, he said.
“Those three values will be added up and that is used to award the contract,” Fugett said.
The department has employed incentive-laden contracts before so the contractors who are competing for the contract know the time element will affect who is awarded the low bid, he said.
“People are competing,” Fugett said. “They are sharpening their pencils. Some contractors can come in and shave a lot of time.”
At the bid lettings, he added, “sometimes you will hear gasps in the audience because it’s just amazing what they can do when they need to.”
Incentive-laden contracts and other potential strategies are contained in an 11-page checklist that the engineers, local officials and others will use as a guide to develop the ultimate traffic management plan.
Fugett likens it to a “living diary.” It will document what traffic-management strategies they will use and why, and also why they didn’t use others, he said.
“It’s a document we use to spur conversations,” he said. “Is this really applicable to the project?”
The document also reflects how important traffic management is to any highway or bridge project, Fugett said.
“It’s really trying to figure out how all of this is going to work,” he said. “It’s a challenge, but it’s exciting to us because we don’t get to do [projects like] this all of the time.”
The document requires engineers to consider everyone who uses the bridge, including police, fire, ambulance and transit.
Jon Swanson, the executive director of Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services, the ambulance service for much of central Arkansas, attended last month’s meeting.
He notes that the region’s only two Level 1 trauma centers are on the south side of the river - Arkansas Children’s Hospital and UAMS Medical Center.
There are going to be times, he said, when his ambulance crews will need to get to either hospital from the north side of the river as quickly as possible, which precludes the use of either the far-flung I-430 or I-440 bridges.
“I welcome the opportunity to be part of the conversation,” Swanson said. “I’m simply trying to see that we’re given consideration.”
Still, it remains early in the process.
Beyond the incentive laden contract and the Main Street Bridge, what other strategies they will employ remains unknown, although Fugett said the traffic management also likely will include reconfiguring the timing of the traffic signals.
“We’re still trying to determine where the traffic is, and that determines what needs to take place,” Ort said. “There is no plan yet. You are taking out a bridge crossing. This will be unique.”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/11/2013